Still alive, still curious
Mom arrives today.
Carly got dumped last night. Her birthday is in two days. I told her it was probably just because he didn't know what to buy her for a present and that it was obviously him because she's beautiful, intelligent, and has a great sense of humor. (Or as she always adds about me, "Plus, you smell good and you have great hair!")
But I'm starting to understand why men might not want to date us. There's the good old intimidation factor, which seems to get worse as we get older. There are now younger, more pliable, females. And we are both observant people who are always picking up on strange social dynamics, which can be kind of spooky. I have a very big personality (and Carly's, while quieter, isn't small.) I don't fit in very well, and the older I get the less I try. I need a lot of time alone. I read too much. I don't make enough money, or drive a nice car. I live in a trailer park. I have strange relatives. I am a woman of many appetites. As a good friend pointed out there's something about my gusto that equals vulgarity, which he meant in the best of all possible ways, but which is even in the worst way, true. The number one complaint I get when people dump me, "Too intense."
The worst part is she came over Sunday because she had a case of the dreadfuls. We walked, talked, smoked, and generally smoothed out the edges, but now she's seeing it as a premonition, and the next time the dreadfuls happen they will be harder to get through. And the timing, just before her birthday, in a week with both a bridal and baby shower, is spectacularly bad.
I'm in the middle of Under My Skin the first volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography. Most of the first book is about growing up in Southern Rhodesia. The parts about her childhood are fascinating, it's a glimpse into a totally different world with things like food safes, which are a cabinets with double layers of chicken wire filled with charcoal. Water is continuously dripped over the charcoal to keep the food cool. It's an early form of refrigeration in a climate without electricity and in which ice for an icebox is unavailable.
I'm now at the point where she's in her first marriage. (Martha Quest material.) She keeps talking about middle-class poverty. Clearly her family didn't have a ton of money, and many of the colonials struggled, but she also talks about what she's learned about poverty since. She compared white poverty to black poverty. And middle-class lack of funds to poor whites who are tramping between farms looking for work. She keeps coming back to people's petty complaints about their lives, and asking, "What were we expecting?" She also wonders who promised us something better, how we learned to expect more. She might be talking about her generation, but in some ways it better describes mine. We are living in a time of reduced expectations, and the future may hold less innovation and more sacrifice than at any other time in the last hundred years.
Some predict a new dark ages with further ethnic conflicts, disease, and environmental degredation. I like to think of new innovations bridging those gaps, but I'm not certain. The future is hard for me to see. (Lessing is heavily influenced by early 20C futurists, which might account for her attempts at S/F, including Four Gated City, which I have to say was a truly surreal ending to the otherwise realistic Martha Quest series.)
I have more to say about the subject, and how it relates to Carly & I being single gals of a certain age, but I don't have the right words for it now. I just know that one of the things I never understood about getting older is how the disappointments pile up, and how each disappoint is added to the general heap, and they get heavier, and it gets harder to heft and to hope. I'm still a young woman. I look at someone like Doris Lessing and wonder, "How is it she's still alive and curious?"